'Chappie': How Realistic Is the Film's Artificial Intelligence?

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The new film "Chappie" features an artificially intelligent robot
that becomes sentient and must learn to navigate the competing
forces of kindness and corruption in a human world.

Directed by Neill Blomkamp, whose previous work includes
"District 9" and "Elysium," the film takes place in the South
African city of Johannesburg. The movie's events occur in a
speculative present when the city has deployed a force of police
robots to fight crime. One of these robots, named "Chappie,"
receives an upgrade that makes him sentient.

Yet, while today's technology isn't quite at the level of that in
the film, "We definitely have had major
aspects of systems like Chappie already in existence for
quite a while," said Wolfgang Fink, a physicist and AI expert at
Caltech and the University of Arizona, who did not advise on the
film.

Chappie in real life?

Existing AI computer systems modeled on the human brain, known as
artificial neural networks, are capable of learning from
experience, just like Chappie does in the film, Fink said. "When
we expose them to certain data, they can learn rules, and they
can even learn behaviors," he said. Today's AI can even
teach itself to play video games.

Something akin to Chappie's physical hardware also exists.
Google-owned robotics company Boston Dynamics, based in Waltham,
Massachusetts, has an anthropomorphic bipedal robot, called
PETMAN, that can walk, bend and perform other movements on its
own. And carmaker Honda has ASIMO, a sophisticated humanoid robot
that once played soccer with President Barack Obama.

But Chappie goes beyond what current systems can do, because he
becomes self-aware. There's a moment during the film when he
says, "I am Chappie."

"That statement, if that's truly result of a reasoning process
and not trained, that is huge," Fink said. An advance like that
would mean robots could go beyond being able to play a video game
or execute a task better than a human. The machine would be able
to discriminate between self and nonself, which is a "key quality
of any truly autonomous system," Fink said.

Childlike persona

As opposed to the "Terminator"-style killing machines of most
Hollywood AI films, Chappie's persona is depicted as childlike
and innocent — even cute.

To create Chappie, actor Sharlto Copley performed the part, and a
team of animators "painted" the computer-generated robot over his
performance, said visual effects supervisor Chris Harvey.

"We still had Sharlto on set [as Chappie]," Harvey told Live
Science. But unlike many other special-effects-heavy films,
"Chappie" did not use motion capture, which involves an actor
wearing a special suit with reflective markers attached and
having cameras capture the performer's movements. Instead, "the
animators did that by hand," Harvey said.

Because Chappie is a robot, Harvey's biggest fear was not being
able to have it convey emotion. So, his team gave Chappie an
expressive pair of "ears" (antennae), a brow bar and a chin bar,
which could express a fairly wide range of emotions, "almost like
a puppy dog," Harvey said.

Humanity's biggest threat

In the film, Chappie's "humanity" is sharply contrasted with the
inhumanity of Hugh Jackman's character Vincent Moore, a former
military engineer who is developing a massive, brain-controlled
robot called the "Moose" to rival intelligent 'bots like Chappie.

"The original concept for Jackman's character was always to be in
opposition to artificial intelligence," Blomkamp told reporters.

Jackman himself takes a more positive view of AI. "Unlike my
character, I like to think optimistically about these
discoveries," Jackman said in a news conference. "I'm a firm
believer that the pull for human beings is toward the good
generally outweighing the bad."

But billionaire
Elon Musk and famed astrophysicist
Stephen Hawking have sounded alarms about the dangers of
artificial intelligence, with Musk calling it humanity's "biggest
existential threat."

Truly autonomous AI is not something most researchers are working
on, but Fink shares some of these concerns.

"Depending on how old we are, we might see something in our
lifetime which might become scary," Fink said. If it gets out of
control, he said, "then we have created a monster."